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I’m still around.  I have been focusing on work and helping out the SCV crews in the field for chasing instead of chasing myself this spring while I wait for the auroras. 

I was again treated to an amazing display of the Auroras or Northern Lights a few days ago and even was able to play around with a highly modified setup to do VR Aurora videos.

Here is the VR Video.

https://youtu.be/kcri0ppponw

I was also shooting video with my other camera to get some real time Auroras dancing around the sky.

And of course I was able to get some still photos but I do need to upgrade my old Canon to something more modern.

After spending most of the morning yesterday staking out the plane that turned into a non story so far… I ended up sleeping for most of the evening and into the morning so now I’m back on the normal sleep schedule for a few days. Lets just hope I can keep this up for at least a week.

Well the good news, I might be staying in town after all since a couple of things came together over the weekend. I don’t want to jinx it but its coming together finally.
On another note, since I got up early today, I’m back to working on the stock video collection and editing all the scrap video (stuff I said I would get back to…) while the other computer takes care of the online files. I found this video from 2003 that I totally forgot about and its of some lightning.

After looking at the lightning and slowing it way down, I noticed something. It has a step leader in the video. Here is the before and after frames and if you look at the before frame, it looks like a leader coming up from the ground.

Below the screen caps is the time-lapse footage. Since this is really close to the impact point, I don’t want to call this a ghost image since this is not way off and it only shows a little of the bolt, not the whole thing that goes off to the edge of the frame.

The Miami Heat is in town and rumor has it they are looking to take Kevin Garnett back to Miami from the Minnesota Timberwolves.

What did I say? Say it is not so… Yes, A good day scuba diving the shit out of a half ass day of storm chasing.
The storm threat was crap today and even worse, it went over to Wisconsin and Wisconsin sucks for storm chasing so, I went diving.

Dove Lac “of vis” Lavon (Lac Lavon Mine Pit) in Burnsville today and it was not that bad, 8-10 feet and the weeds were not in yet at the shore. The water level is down by at least 3 feet but the stocked fish made it worth it.

I had Sunny’s, Crappies, Northerns, Trout and Small Mouth Bass all swimming around me and checking out what was up. I was like having a huge fish take all to myself to play with the fish. For a local dive spot 10 minutes from home, it’s pretty sweet considering it takes me longer to get all my gear ready then it does to drive there. If I get this new gig out east, I’m going to be missing the diving and dive buddies a lot. But I also in talks again with some gigs in Florida and may end up moving there too. I do have the underwater video gig nailed down at the end of June with Brian. Were going to document the Ultimate Getaway and at first it was going to be a big were we were doing a short 3 day gig but now it has turned into a seven day underwater video shoot that now has the Florida Fish and Wildlife doing a survey of the reefs and we will be surveying them and the boat for a documentary about scuba diving.

Today I have been wrapping up the final clean up of the stock video archive and finishing up the catalog work. I found a video on the last hard drive of stuff that I totally forgot about (yes I have that much video…)

This was from Lac Lavon last year when I brought some freezer burned shrimp with me when I went scuba diving. The fish went insane and there were thousands of them around me. There were some people fishing from shore and they were kind of pissed thinking I ruined the fishing and scared the fish off… Yeah right!!!

The severe storms that hit the metro were not really in the forecast yesterday. I just got done pulling an all nighter and a last minute interview with the company out east that wanted to ask me some additional questions and I was just getting ready to relax and get a few hours of sleep before the insanity of the mod risk down south kicked in. And then it happened. The cells I was watching and thinking, eh, I don’t want to deal with traffic, about a half hour later, they went tornadic warned right on top of my target.

I was not too bummed out about it because of several reason. The main one to start was that it was that the visibility was nil. From home I could barely see four miles. The other was that this was in a major grid lock area and unless you were there, your not going to get there to begin with. The third, this stuff was so unorganized and we were not even in the SPC Slight Risk area. These were normal summer time severe thunderstorms with large hail and damaging winds.

What was funny was knowing that almost all of the chasers were converging on the stuff in TX and OK for the Mod Risk and even that was lame.
Total miles chased today was about 80 if you include the trip over to 494 and over to highway 52 then back down south where I intercepted the tornadic warned cell in Goodhue County. There was a lot of gust front junk and they were insane HP setups but on average, it was a better chase then most since I was back home within a couple hours.
Going back to bed now. I’ll post some pics later when I’m awake.

Ok, as promised, here is the image from Goodhue County, MN yesterday. I was right under the meso marker when I took this. For a chase that was not expected, it was kind of fun but for what they were reporting as a tornado, um, yeah…

Ok, it is 10:00 A.M. and I am going to get some sleep since this is like 10:00 P.M. for me. The video from last night is on the network and I’m about ready to pass out after getting a bunch of work done here during the overnight and a storm chase.
It’s time to crash and get some sleep but here is the screen cap from The Weather Channel this morning.

Okay, that was close enough for me before I start to get a little worried.

Here is a video cap of the chase today around Highway 14 and 35. The lightning was pretty insane but when you see the flash and hear the boom less then a second apart, we have issues.

Since my last post, in under 30 minutes, I was able to tear down my laptop to a total tear down, repair the power plug that has been giving me issues and put it back together. Dell has some issue with the power ports that come loose from the motherboard and you have to pull the mother board and heat up the solder the joint back together and put the whole thing back together again.

Ok I cheated a little, I heated up the soldering iron before I started just to save some time but hey from start to finish, less then thirty minutes to put this thing back together and type this blog.

Yes, it was really annoying me how the power would flicker so I just tore it apart and rebuilt it.

Now as I was getting ready to get back to the books, looks like I need to go and work on my deck. A line of storms is starting to try and pull itself together off to the west.